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At the same time though: if AI based cheating is so effective then is college itself useful?


If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful?

It’s the same old story with a new set of technology.


> If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful?

What's your answer? Surely it was proven to be "not useful"? I don't think I ever met a person who benefitted from knowing math now that everyone has a calculator in pocket. Other than maybe playing some games where if you do calculation on the fly you win


Well, if you don't know math because the calculator does it you would also have no understanding of the concepts e.g. addition, subtraction, whole numbers or fraction etc. so you would not know how to in use or what to do with a calculator. It's a tool that is useful to do something you know how it works faster.


But that's very different with LLMs and that stuff. You don't need to know how to write an essay or write a song. That's kind of the point.


LLMs don't know how to write an essay or a song.

To be able to direct an LLM you would need to know how to do those things yourself.


LLM don't "know" anything. It's a program. But those programs get fed so many (mostly stolen) essays and songs that it outputs a convincing essay or song.

So the end result is this. you don't need to know how to write an essay but you get an essay written for you. It's very different from using calculator and knowing math or using ProTools and knowing how to make a song.


> Surely it was proven to be "not useful"?

I don't think we're living in the same world. I have met plenty of people who, despite having a calculator, can't solve their own problems because they don't know what to do with it in order to solve their problem.


Examples pls. I know people who can do mental math and it's maybe only sometimes useful in some games.


It was (to some degree), and could still be. The status quo was more effective, relatively speaking, before the AI boom. The status quo appears to be trending towards ineffective, post-AI boom.

So in order to remain useful, the status quo of higher education will probably have to change in order to adapt to the ubiquity of AI, and LLMs currently.

Just because you can cheat at something doesn't mean doing it legitimately isn't useful.


Thinking of that. We have build these expensive machines with massive investments to be able to output what we expect college students to output... Wouldn't that tell us that well maybe that output has some value, intent or use? Or we would not have spend those resources...

Just because machine can do things, doesn't mean humans should be able to do it too. Say reading a text aloud.


https://innovationlabs.harvard.edu/events/your-network-is-yo...

^ Why many go to Harvard. Very nice club.




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